Frequently Asked Questions

If we receive a referral from you, your GP, or another health professional, we will contact you to arrange an initial assessment appointment. We will call you, send you a text message, an email and/or a letter inviting you to contact us to book your appointment. We will usually contact you within a day or two of receiving your referral and aim to get you booked in for an assessment within 1-2 weeks.

No. Talking Therapies is a free NHS service.

The first appointment will be for an assessment. This may be conducted over the phone or face to face. You will have the opportunity to talk about your difficulties. This helps us decide whether you need the kind of help this service offers. You will also have an opportunity to ask any questions you may have. At the end of this meeting, we will let you know what will happen next. The therapist will communicate the outcome of the assessment to the person who referred you and your GP.

The information you share will be kept confidential within the team. The only time we will break this confidentiality is if you mention anything that causes us to think there is a risk of harm to yourself or to others, including if you tell us that you have been involved in or been a victim of a serious crime. In these situations, we will want to think with you about how to keep you and others safe. We may need to disclose some information to the relevant organisations to do this, which could involve reporting crimes to the Police where there is potential ongoing risk to you or the public. This is a legal safeguarding requirement but we will let you know if we are going to share any information and will support you to be involved in the process.

We are a flexible service and are able to offer appointments outside usual office hours starting from 8am Monday to Friday, and up until 8pm on Monday until Thursday evenings.  We also work with a number of partner organisations, such as Xyla and ieso, who can provide a limited number of sessions at the weekends.

We have several therapists who speak languages other than English, who we will match you with if we can. If we cannot do this, we will arrange to use an interpreter from a professional interpreting service.

We have a range of questionnaires and materials available in a number of different languages to support your therapy work.

No we do not provide home visits, but we can offer support via the telephone or online video call. You will discuss your preferences for how you will access any treatment that is offered when you have your assessment.

If you are already having therapy elsewhere, we recommend you first review your progress with your current therapist or team as having more than one type of therapy at a time is not usually recommended. You are welcome to contact us for an assessment, particularly if you feel that things are not working for you, to consider what the options might be. If, however, you do wish to proceed with treatment within our service, we ask that you are fully available and committed to therapy with us.